This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
There isn’t much that Francis Young doesn’t know about fairies. He can describe the mecan izhandaizhed and mecan emagaizhed, the masters and mistresses of the forest of the Finno-Ugric Vepsian people of Russia. He can recount tales of the ljúflingar (“sweet ones’) described in 1637 by Bishop Gísli Oddson of Skálholt in Iceland. He can explain that, in medieval Ireland, people thought the fairies of their nation, the aos sí, had their own monasteries.
The one thing Young can’t tell you, it seems, is whether he believes in fairies himself.
This comprehensively researched book covers everything even the most dedicated fairy-follower could want to discover, with accounts of sightings and beliefs across all types of cultures, from ancient times to the modern day. But, you realise after a while, Young never commits to saying that the accounts are false.
Indeed he comments on the implications of the phrase “fairy tale”, noting that “neither religion, belief in paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and poltergeists, nor belief in divination provoke scorn quite like belief in fairies”. The implication is that Young at least wants to think that the beings are real.
He’s not the first. Almost all contemporary images of fairies have pointed ears: these “derive ultimately from the goat-like or asinine ears of the Greek god Pan”. In the north of England fairies used to be known as elves. In many traditions, using the f-word itself was seen as bad luck, with euphemisms such as “the good people”, “the good neighbours” and “the gentry” coming into play.
It’s possible that there might be a link between “fairy rings” (naturally-occuring circles of mushrooms) and the belief that the creatures engage in circular dances, but this isn’t certain. Then there’s the phenomenon of the “stray sod”, when “someone steps on a fairy-haunted piece of ground and becomes lost and disoriented, regardless of their location”.
“Fairies,” writes Young, “are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, but — like us — are capable of both … And fairies are social beings: like us, they have children, live in families, and form societies and hierarchies.” He also points out that fairies are “misfits”, arguing that in view of this it’s no wonder that we identify with them. This fellow-feeling with the subject of his book might be an example of a tendency he mentions: the subconscious desire to believe that we’re linked with nature.
As J.R.R. Tolkien (who, Young is keen to point out, thought that fairies might exist) observed, “absence of the sense of separation of ourselves from beasts” is a characteristic feature of fairy tales that seems to speak to some deep longing as old as time.
It isn’t just Tolkien in the “believer” camp. Young cites C.S. Lewis and W.B. Yeats, as well as the lesser-known Alison Uttley (children’s author, 1884–1976, “firmly believed”) and the writer D.J. Watkins-Pitchford (1905–90) who “saw a gnome in his nursery at the age of four and was ever after convinced of their existence”. Moses Pitt, the printer and bookseller, was “arguably the lynchpin of the Enlightenment in 1690s London. Yet he believed in fairies”.
There was also an organisation that gloried in the name the Fairy Investigation Society. It was founded by Sir Quentin C.A. Craufurd, a naval officer who was fascinated with wireless communication, and who in 1920 began experimenting with the new technology to see if he could contact the spirit world.
Amongst the society’s members was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, head of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. Clearly a capable and intelligent chap — just one who also happened to think that fairies existed. He thought that they were an essential part of plants and vegetables growing.
But the poster boy for the “you don’t have to be a nutter to believe” movement is Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of the world’s most famously rational detective was taken in by the 1917 hoax in which 9-year-old Frances Griffiths and her 16-year-old cousin Elsie Wright photographed cardboard pictures of fairies at the bottom of a garden in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley.
Young gives the details of the story, though never actually spells out that the photos were of drawings, and relates the girls’ argument that they only used the trickery to provide images of things they really had seen but had been unable to photograph.
What’s more, Griffiths only ever admitted that four of the photographs were faked — she never conceded the same about the final one. Young maintains that
the true story of the Cottingley fairies is so haunting, so complex, so remarkable … that the hoax has turned out to be as historically important as if Elsie and Frances really had successfully photographed fairies.
We encounter similar reasoning from the American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, who in 1965 smoked the hallucinogenic drug DMT and saw some “self-transforming machine elves”.
Whilst most people might be minded to be dismissive of the experiences of those who use psychedelics because they had those experiences whilst using psychedelics, for McKenna the very fact that psychedelics were seemingly necessary to unlock such experiences was evidence of their significance.
There really is no arguing against logic like this.
It’s the old “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” routine. “You can’t prove fairies don’t exist,” goes the spiel. “We don’t have to,” reply the non-believers. “We never claimed they do exist — that was you. As such it’s up to you to do the proving.”
Young refers to the evidence of personal testimony, the stories of all those people over the centuries who claim to have seen fairies. He argues that “it is not the sort of evidence that sceptics want or that science can process. But this, of course, is the point … the methodologies of the sciences as we know them were explicitly designed to exclude [this type of testimony].”
He recounts an experience of his own, in a wood in Warwickshire. He felt as though the atmosphere was special, and as though something might happen. After leaving the wood he realised that his sense of time had been somewhat distorted. But he didn’t actually see any fairies. He seems to prefer J.M. Barrie to scientific rigour. In Peter Pan, he reminds us, every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies,” a fairy dies.
